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UNCLE JEFF SHIELDS, LEXINGTON, VA. 




OLD SOUTH 



A i^@i!i)@f raplb 



BY 



H. M. HAMILL, D.D. 



& 



^ 



Smith &- Lamar. Agents, Publishing House of the 
• • • Methodist Episcopal Church, South 
Dallas, Texas Nashville, Tennessee 






o 



LJBRAiTl' of CONGRESS 
Twu Copies tiscatwa 

FEB 4 1905 

GLhISS O. XXc. iMOJ 
COPY B. 



HE subject-matter of this little 
book first took form in an ad- 
dress before the students of 
Emor} College, Oxford, Ga., in June, 
1904. If apology be needed for putting 
it in type, the writer finds it in the re- 
quest of an old woman, now eighty-six 
years of age, a true daughter of the Old 
South, whose lightest wish has been the 
law of his life for more than fifty years. 




THE OLD SOUTH. 

Y theme is 'The Old South." I have 
no apology for those who may deem 
it time-worn or obsolete. I am 
handicapped in beginning by mem- 
ories of other writers and speakers 
who have dealt more worthily than I can hope 
to do with my subject. The Old South has not 
been wanting in men to speak and write upon it. 
Friend and foe alike have exploited it. It has 
been the burden of poetry not always inspired, 
and of oratory not always inspiring. Not a few 
have been its critics who knew it only by hear- 
say. Indeed, much of current literature upon 
the Old South is from those who were bom after 
it had passed away. I have no fault to find 
with any who have thus written or spoken, how- 
ever worthily or unworthily, if only it was done 
in kindness. If over the dust of the Old South, 
while discoursing upon its virtues or its vices, 
any one has dealt generously with the one and 
5 



THE OLD SOUTH 



fairly with the other, I am content, though praise 
or blame may not always have been wisely be- 
stowed. 

I was born in and of the Old South. At six- 
teen, after a year under General Lee, I received 
my parole at Appomattox, and went home to 
look upon the ruin of the Old South. Whatever 
is good or evil in me I owe chiefly to that Old 
South. Habit, motive, ideal, ambition, passion 
and prejudice, love and hatred, were formed in 
it and by it. My life work as a man has been 
wrought under what is called the New South, but 
inspiration and aspiration to it came out of the 
Old South. The spell it cast upon my boyhood 
is strong upon me after more than a generation 
has gone. It is not the spell of enchantment. 
It has not blinded me to bad or good qualities, 
and after the lapse of a half century and de- 
spite the tenderness for it that grows with the 
passing years, I think I can see and judge the 
Old South and give account of it more impartially 
than one who received it at second-hand. 

The Old South, in itself and apart from all 
other considerations, will always be a profitable 
study. It is the one unique page of our national 
6 



THE OLD SOUTH 



history. Indeed, it comprehends two hundred 
and fifty years of history with scarce a parallel. 
I think one will search in vain history, ancient or 
modern, to find a likeness to the Old South, so- 
cially, intellectually, politically, or religiously. I 
do not wonder that romancer, poet, historian, and 
philosopher have gathered from it material and 
inspiration. As a matter of fact, the past decade 
has brought forth more literature concerning the 
Old South than the entire generation which pre- 
ceded it. Its body lies moldering in the ground, 
but its soul goes marching on. Wherein espe- 
cially was it unique? 



TO begin with, it was in the South rather than 
the North that the seed of American libert}- 
was first planted. Jamestown, not Plymouth Rock,, 
was the matrix of true Americanism. Poet and 
orator have made much of the rock-bound coast 
and savage wild to which the Puritan fathers 
came, and have had little to say of the Cavaliers 
who fought their way to conquest over savage 
beast and man. Winthrop, Standish, and Cotton 
7 



THE OLD SOUTH 



Mather are set forth by provincial and partisan 
writer and speaker as exclusive national types of 
pioneer courage, wisdom, and heroism. I have 
read more than one sneer in alleged national his- 
tories against "the gentlemen of Jamestown," of 
whom it was said that there were "eleven laboring 
men and thirty-five gentlemen." But the histo- 
rians who sneer fail to note how these same gen- 
tlemen felled more trees and did more hard work 
than the men of the ax and pick. Long after 
Jamestown had become a memory, I had seen the 
descendants of those same derided gentlemen in 
the Army of Northern Virginia, possessors of in- 
herited wealth and reared to luxury from their 
cradles, yet toiling in the trenches or tramping on 
the dusty highway or charging into the mouth 
of cannon with unfailing cheerfulness. 

I do not disparage the stern integrity and high 
achievement of the Puritan sires. I gladly ac- 
cord them a high place among the fathers and 
founders of the republic. But putting Puri- 
tan and Cavalier side by side, rating each fairly 
at his real worth and by what he did to fix per- 
manently the qualities that have made us great, 
I am confident I could make good my proposi- 




AUNT HANNAH, 



THE OLD SOUTH 



tion that deeper down at the foundation of our 
greatness as a people than all other influences 
are the qualities and spirit that have marked the 
Cavalier in the Old World or the New. 

Was it not in the Old South, for instance, that 
the first word was spoken that fired the colonial 
heart and pointed the way to freedom from the 
tyranny of Britain ? Later, when all hearts along 
the Atlantic seaboard were burning with hope of 
liberty, was it not one from the Old South who 
presided over the fateful Congress that finally 
broke with the mother country? And did not 
another from the Old South frame the immortal 
declaration of national independence? And 
when the hard struggle for liberty was begun, 
it was from the Old South that a general was 
called to lead the ragged Continentals to victory. 
Follow the progress of that war of the Revolu- 
tion, and it will be seen how in its darkest days 
the light of hope and courage burned nowhere 
so bravely as in the Old South. 

Seventy-two years and fifteen Presidents suc- 
ceeded between the last gun of the Revolution 
and the first gun fired upon Sumter in 1861. Nine 
out of fifteen Presidents, and fifty of the seventy- 
9 



THE OLD SOUTH 



two years, are to be credited to the statesmanship 
of the Old South. What Washington did with 
the sword for the young republic, Chief Justice 
Marshall, of Virginia, made permanently secure 
by the wisdom of the great jurist. After him 
came a long line of worthy successors from the 
Old South, in the persons of judges, vice pres- 
idents, cabinet officers, officers of the army and 
navy, who were called to serve in the high places 
of the government. The fact is that whatever 
unique quality of greatness and fame came to the 
republic for more than a half century after it 
was begun was largely due to the wisdom of 
Southern statesmanship. It is hard, I know, to 
credit such a statement as to the dominating in- 
fluence in our early national history, now that 
nearly fifty years have passed since a genuine son 
of the South has stood by the helm of the ship of 
State. 

As with the statesmanship, so with the military 
leadership of the Old South. The genius for 
war has been one of the gifts of the sons of the 
South from the beginning, not only as fighters 
with a dash that would have charmed the heart 
of Ney, but as bom commanders, tacticians, and 

lO 



THE OLD SOUTH 



strategists. In the two great wars of the repub- 
lic, Great Britain and Mexico were made to feel 
the skill and courage of Southern general and 
rifleman. In the Civil War — greatest of modern 
times, and in some respects greatest of all time — 
the greater generals who commanded, as well as 
the Presidents who commissioned them, were 
born on Southern soil, and carried into their high 
places the, spirit of the Old South. In the 
extension of the republic from the seaboard to the 
great central valley, and beyond to the mountains 
and the Pacific, Southern generalship and states- 
manship led the way. The purchase of Louisi- 
ana, the annexation of Texas and the Southwest, 
were conceived and executed chiefly by Southern 
men. 

So for more than fifty formative years of our 
history the Old South was the dominating power 
in the nation, as it had been in the foundation 
of the colonies out of which came the repub- 
lic, and later in fighting its battles of independ- 
ence and in framing its policies of government. 
And I make bold to reaffirm that whatever 
strength or symmetry the republic had acquired 
at home, or reputation it had achieved abroad, in 



THE OLD SOUTH 



those earlier crucial years of its history were 
largely due to the patriotism and ability of South- 
ern statesmanship. Why that scepter of leader- 
ship has passed from its keeping, or why the 
New South is no longer at the front of national 
leadership, is a question that might well give 
pause to one who recalls the brave days when the 
Old South sat at the head of the table and di- 
rected the aflFairs of the nation. 



SOCIALLY, the Old South, like "all Gaul," 
was divided into three parts — the slavehold- 
ing planters, the aristocrats of the social system, 
few relatively in numbers but mighty in wealth 
and authority; the negro slaves, who by the mil- 
lions plowed and sowed its fields and reaped its 
harvests, and who for hundreds of years, both in 
slavery and freedom, have found contented 
homes in the South ; and lastly the nonslavehold- 
ing whites, a distinctly third estate. 

The nonslaveholding white of the Old South 
was essentially siii generis. He was really a vital 
part of a singular semifeudal system, yet, as far 



THE OLD SOUTH 



as he could, he maintained his independence of it. 
He was between two social fires. His lack of 
culture and breeding, his rude speech and dress, 
barred him from the big house of the planter, 
except as a sort of political dependent or hench- 
man. On the other hand, to the negro he was 
variously known as **poor folks," "poor white 
trash," and at best as "half-strainers." While 
there was riot a little in common between him 
and the master of slaves, he had literally no deal- 
ings with the negro. Here and there, if one 
rose to ownership of land or slaves by dint of 
extraordinary industry or good fortune, his so- 
cial position was scarcely improved. He became 
like the shoddy "New Riches" of our own time, 
in a class to himself. 

There are not a few illusions as to these "crack- 
er" whites, which fanciful magazine and dialect 
writers have helped to spread. A benevolently 
intended effort has been in progress for a genera- 
tion on the part of certain sentimentalists, with 
more money than wisdom, to civilize and Chris- 
tianize what they are pleased to call the "moun- 
tain whites." One would gather from the pleas 
made before religious conventions, and from the 



n 



THE OLD SOUTH 



facile writers who have made these whites their 
special care, that they have dwelt continually in 
religious darkness and destitution, and greatly 
needed the alien missionary to shed the efful- 
gence of his superior civilization and Christianity 
upon him. I think I am in a position to say 
that this forlorn and destitute Southern moun- 
taineer, true to his ancient characteristics, has 
received these effusive visitors and their benev- 
olences with one eye partly closed and with con- 
tinued cheerful expectoration at knot holes in the 
neighboring fence. I am reminded of one of 
Bishop Hoss's repertoire of anecdotes, all of 
which have pith and point. Of such a moun- 
taineer as I am depicting, tall, lank, sinewy, 
frowzy, "a bunch of steel springs and chicken 
hawk," a tourist satirically inquired : ''May I ask, 
my friend, if you are a member of the human 
species ?" ''No, by gum," said the mountaineer ; 
"Fm an East Tennesseean." 

As a matter of fact there are few people so 
thoroughly imbued with the religious spirit as 
tiiese same "cracker" mountain whites, though 
it is a religion of the Old rather than of the 
New Testament, in the crude ethics and doctrines 



THE OLD SOUTH 



which they commonly hold. Even the Kentucky 
feudist is after a sort an Old Testament religion- 
ist, who has not gone beyond the idea of the 
"blood avenger" of Mosaic permission. Rude, 
uncouth, ignorant of books as the poor whites of 
the Old South were and continue largely to be, I 
pay them the sincere personal tribute of admira- 
tion for the homespun virtues that have marked 
them as a peculiar people. For two years I 
lived in their wildest mountain fastnesses, went 
in and out of their rude cabins, taught their youth, 
broke bread at their tables, and worshiped God 
with them in their log meetinghouses. I have 
earned a right, therefore, by personal contact and 
knowledge to resent with warmth the imputa- 
tions under which the cracker white, highland or 
lowland, is too often made to suffer. Even so 
distinguished an authority as the Nezv York 
Advocate, in a recent article devoted to this class, 
permitted the usual distortion of fact in all things 
pertaining to Southern problems. 

Of this rude figure of the Old South, it is 
enough to say that no hospitality of the planta- 
tion mansion ever eclipsed that of his humble 
home to the man who sought shelter beneath it. 
15 



THE OLD SOUTH 



If he never forgave a wrong, he never forgot to 
repay a kindness. His honesty was such that a 
man's pocketbook was commonly as safe in the 
trail of a mountaineer or lowlander as in the 
vault of a bank. If he had not books or learning, 
there was something quite as good for his uses 
which he had the knack of inheriting or acquir- 
ing — a home-grown wit and shrewdness of judg- 
ment of men and things. Religiously, he took 
his code and doctrines directly from the Bible, 
and too often patterned after both good and evil 
in that book. He saw no incongruity in dis- 
pensing homemade whisky and helping on a 
protracted meeting at the call of his circuit rider. 
As to his politics, he followed leaders only as he 
respected them, and was always a thorn in the 
flesh of the political trickster. If the master of 
slaves was an aspirant for office, and was pos- 
sessor of both manhood and money, the cracker 
white easily became his supporter. Usually hold- 
ing the balance of power, he taught many a sharp 
lesson to unworthy men who sought his political 
favor. Generally the poor white was hostile to 
slavery; yet singularly enough, true to the pa- 
triotism and loyalty strangely formed in him for 
i6 




SAM DAVIS. 



THE OLD SOUTH 



centuries in his isolated condition, when the ar- 
mies of the North began their invasions of the 
South, these same whites by the tens and hun- 
dreds of thousands put on the gray, and fell into 
line under the generalship of the owners of plan- 
tation and slave. If there was ever such a prov- 
erb current among them as "the rich man's war, 
but the poor man's fight," I did not hear it from 
the lips of the brave fellows from the log cabins 
who became the famous fighters of the Confed- 
eracy. Over their lowly and sometimes lonely 
and unkept graves I would lovingly inscribe that 
exquisitely pathetic epitaph which one may read 
upon a Confederate monument in South Carolina, 
dedicated especially to the men who had nothing 
to fight for or die for but patriotism and honor : 

This monument perpetuates the memory of those 
who, true to the instincts of their birth, faithful to the 
teaching of their fathers, constant in their love for the 
State, died in the performance of their duty; who have 
glorified a fallen cause by the simple manhood of their 
lives, the patient endurance of suffering, and the heroism 
of death; and who, in the dark hours of imprisonment 
and the hopelessness of the hospital, in the short, sharp 
agony of the field, found support and consolation in the 
belief that at home they would not be forgotten. 

2 17 y 



THE OLD SOUTH 



BETWEEN the negro and his master there 
was ever in general a feeling of mutual re- 
spect and confidence. If I could gather from the 
Old South its most beautiful and quaint conceits 
and incidents, I would find none so full of pathos 
and interest as the long-continued and ever-deep- 
ening affection that often, indeed I might say 
commonly, bound together the white master and 
the black slave. Neither poverty nor ruin, nor 
changed conditions, nor disruption of every or- 
der, social and political, was effectual in breaking 
this bond of loyalty and love; and now, so long 
after the period of enfranchisement has come, if 
I wanted concrete evidence of the singular beauty 
of the social system of the Old South, I should 
summon as my witnesses those lingering relics 
of the ante-bellum order — the ''old massa" and 
the old negro. Before the last of that era are 
gone I should be glad to contribute to some such 
monument as that proposed by ex-Governor Tay- 
lor — a trinity of figures to be carved from a sin- 
gle block of Southern marble, consisting of the 
courtly old planter, high-bred and gentle in face 
and manner; the plantation "uncle," the counter- 
part in ebony of the master so loyally served and 

i8 



THE OLD SOUTH 



imitated; and the broad-bosomed black "mam- 
my/' with varicolored turban, spotless apron, 
and beaming face, the friend and helper of every 
living thing in cabin or mansion. 

I would that I had the power to put before you 
vividly and really the strange and beautiful social 
life of the Old South. It was Arcadian in its 
simplicity and well-nigh ideal in its conditions. 
It was a reproduction of the palmiest days and 
best features of feudalism, with little of the evil 
of that system. I know I am confronted by a 
host of critics and maligners of the so-called 
"slaveocracy" or "oligarchy" of the Old South. 
I have often read and heard of its despotism and 
cruelty from those who did not know or did not 
intend to be truthful or just. The war that swept 
slavery and the slaveholder out of existence was 
inspired and envenomed by such misrepresenta- 
tion. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was a museum of 
barbarities set forth as the ordinary life of the 
Old South, a composite of brilliant and brutal 
falsehoods. I have no defense of feudalistic 
subjection of the many to the few, nor am I a 
friend to caste. Yet I have read history in vain 
and studied human progress to small account if 
19 



THE OLD SOUTH 



I have not, with others, discovered that a true 
development of society, the stability of govern- 
ment, the conservation of the rights of all classes, 
depend largely upon a social system in which one 
class, few in numbers, capable and conscientious, 
rules the other classes. A pure democracy is the 
dream of the idealist, and would be unprofitable 
even in the millennium. The men who own the 
lands of a country, its moneys, ships, and com- 
merce, who maintain the traditions of the past, 
and trace their blood to the beginnings of a coun- 
try's existence — these will inevitably become the 
leaders and rulers of a country. So the Old 
South had its aristocracy, whose leaders laughed 
at the doctrine of equality as proclaimed by sen- 
timentalists at home and abroad. 

This Old South aristocracy was of threefold 
structure — it was an aristocracy of wealth, of 
blood, and of honor. It was not the wealth of 
the shoddy aristocracy that here and there, even 
in the New South, has forced itself into notice 
and vulgarly flaunts its acquisitions. It came by 
inheritance of generations chiefly, as with the 
nobility of England and France. Only in the 
aristocracy of the Old World could there be found 
20 



THE OLD SOUTH 



a counterpart to the luxury, the ease and grace of 
inherited wealth, which characterized the ruling 
class of the Old South. There were no gigantic 
fortunes as now, and wealth was not increased 
or diminished by our latter-day methods of spec- 
ulation or prodigal and nauseating display. The 
ownership of a broad plantation, stately country 
and city homes, of hundreds of slaves, of accumu- 
lations of money and bonds, passed from father 
to children for successive generations. Whatever 
cohesiveness the law could afford bound such 
great estates together, so that prodigality or 
change could least affect them. Here and there 
mansions of the old order of Southern aristoc- 
racy are standing in picturesque and melancholy 
ruin, as reminders of the splendor and luxury of 
the ante-bellum planter. A few months ago I 
looked upon the partly dismantled columns of a 
once noble home of the Old South, about which 
there clustered thickly the memories of a great 
name and family which for generations had re- 
ceived the homage of the South. As a child I 
had seen the spacious mansion in the day of its 
pride, as the Mecca of political leaders who came 
to counsel with its princely owner, or as the cen- 



THE OLD SOUTH 



ter of a hospitality that never intermitted until 
the end of wealth came with the desolations of 
war. The glass of fashion and the mold of 
form made it famous as a social magnet. In 
those old days, its beautifully kept lawns, its am- 
ple shrubbery, its primeval park of giant oaks, 
its bewildering garden of flowers, its great or- 
chards, its long rows of whitewashed negro 
cabins, its stables and flashing equipages and 
blooded horses and dogs, the army of darkies in 
its fields, the native melody of their songs rising 
and falling in the distance, the grinding of cane 
or ginning of cotton, the soft-shod corps of 
trained servants about the mansion, the mingling 
of bright colors of innumerable visitors, the bril- 
liancy of cut glass and silver, the lavishness of 
everything that could tempt the eye or palate — 
was like a picture from the scenes of Old- World 
splendor rather than of a young Western repub- 
lic. As I looked and brooded over this ruin of 
a long-famous home, its glory all gone, its light 
and laughter dim and silent, I paid tribute to an 
aristocracy of wealth, pleasure-loving indeed, 
with the inherent weaknesses of transmitted es- 
tate, but one which, having freely received, freely 



THE OLD SOUTH 



gave of its abundance in a hospitality eclipsing 
any people whom the world has known. 

Porte Crayon, in Harper's Magazine long be- 
fore the war, and Thomas Nelson Page, in these 
later days, have essayed by pencil and pen to set 
forth the charm of that wonderful hospitality and 
home life of the Old South. I saw the last of it. 
With my parole in my pocket, returning home- 
ward through Virginia with other Confederates, 
hungry and foot-sore, we turned aside from our 
army-beaten road to a spacious plantation man- 
sion on the crest of a hill, under whose porch sat 
a lonely old man, the one living creature we could 
discern. When we asked for bread, he excused 
himself for a moment on the plea that family 
and servants were gone, and that he must do our 
bidding. In a little while he returned with a 
huge platter of bread and meat, apologizing for 
a menu so little varied. When we had eaten as 
only Confederate soldiers could eat and were 
filled, we took pieces of money from our little 
store and tendered him in pay. I can never for- 
get the big tears that welled up in the eyes of 
the old-time Virginian and the flush on his cheeks, 
as he said : "No, boys ; it is the last morsel of food 
23 



THE OLD SOUTH 



that the enemy has left me. There is not a living 
creature or an atom of food remaining, but there 
is not money enough in both armies to tempt my 
poverty. I've kept it up as long as I had it to 
give." 

Down under all this wealth of fertile field and 
dusky laborer and palatial home, there was some- 
thing in which the old-time Southerner took a 
pride beyond that which he felt in material wealth. 
His aristocracy of wealth was as nothing com- 
pared to his aristocracy of blood. An old fam- 
ily name that had held its place in the social and 
political annals of his State for generations was 
a heritage vastly dearer to him than wealth. Back 
to the gentle-blooded Cavaliers who came to 
found this Western world, he delighted to trace 
his ancestry. There could be no higher honor to 
him than to link his name with the men who had 
planted the tree of liberty and made possible a 
great republic. Whatever honors his forbears 
had won in field or forum, whatever positions of 
public importance they had graced, he had at his 
fingers' ends, and never grew weary of rehears- 
ing. I have nothing but tenderness for this old- 
time weakness of the Southerner, if weakness 
24 



THE OLD SOUTH 



it can be called. To glory in one's blood for 
centuries past, if only kept pure, to take pride 
in the linking of one's name and fame with the 
history of one's country, to grow gentler and 
truer and more self-respecting because of the vir- 
tues of a long line of ancestors who have lifted 
a family name to deserved eminence, has to the 
writer seemed a noble sentiment. I know how 
fools have made mock of it, and how silly people 
in the South have sometimes brought it into 
contempt; but I set forth in pride and gratitude 
for the Old South as one of its distinguishing 
characteristics this devotion to the memory and 
traditions of its ancestry. If here and there the 
course of transmitted blood lapsed into habit or 
deed of shame, it happened so rarely that it set 
the bolder in contrast the aristocracy of gentle 
blood. ''Blood will tell." I remember as a boy 
watching admiringly and yet a little enviously the 
graceful and sometimes reckless military evolu- 
tions of a hundred or more young bloods, who 
were making holiday of the art of war. Trim, 
natty, elegant youngsters they were, in scarlet 
and gold, the scions of great families. I can re- 
member wondering, as I watched them, if the 
25 



THE OLD SOUTH 



same dash and brilliancy that marked them as 
gala day soldiery would be maintained by them 
in the storm of battle which was making ready to 
break upon us. I had my answer. One day 
in Virginia the fortunes of war threw my regi- 
ment at elbows with theirs. Glitter and gold 
and scarlet were all bedimmed ; but the gay laugh, 
the Cavalier dash, the courage that never quailed, 
were with them still as they swung into a des- 
perate charge, singing one of their old cadet songs 
as lightly as a mocking bird's trill. 

If any one should seek for the secret of that 
singular bravery, that supreme contempt of pain 
and privation and indifference to death that dis- 
tinguished our Southern soldiery and won the ad- 
miration of its enemies, I tLink it will be found 
largely in the ambition of the younger generation 
to walk worthily after the steps of their fathers. 
Homogeneous in its citizenship, changing its cus- 
toms little with passing years, slow to imbibe the 
spirit of other countries and of other sections of 
our own country, constant to its own ideals, and 
always a law unto itself, in no country on the face 
of the earth was a good name and family dis- 
26 



THE OLD SOUTH 



tinction more prized and potent than in the Old 
South. 

Linked indissolubly with this aristocracy of 
wealth and of blood was one which, in my judg- 
ment, was stronger than either, and which ex- 
tended beyond the lines of those who were born 
to the purple of wealth or the pride of a great 
name. I do not know better how to denominate 
it than this — the aristocracy of honor. Proud of 
their great homes and positions of leadership, 
and boastful of their high descent, the aristo- 
crats of the Old South, true to the Cavalier tra- 
ditions, erected an ethical system that defined and 
regulated personal and public matters and be- 
came the inflexible code of every Southern gen- 
tleman. Its foundation was laid in a man's "hon- 
or," and the honor of a gentleman was the su- 
preme test and standard of every relation, public 
and private. The extremes of this old Southern 
ethical code were illustrated, on the one part, by 
the maxim that "a man's word is his bond," which 
meant that, the word of honor once passed be- 
tween men, it must be as inviolable as life itself. 
Practically, it came to mean, as the present gen- 
eration little knows or appreciates, that nine- 
27 



THE OLD SOUTH 



tenths of the business of the Old South was a 
mere promise to pay, and that its millions rested 
from year to year upon the faith and honor that 
underlay its vast credit system. A gentleman of 
the Old South might be guilty of not a few pecca- 
dillos. He might sin easily and often against 
himself, but woe to the man who sinned against 
other men by withholding what was due and had 
been promised "on honor.'' Personally I have 
known men of large business affairs whose whole 
fortunes depended on the passing of a word, and 
who on the instant would have surrendered their 
last dollar to make good that "word of honor." 
Nor was this exceptional. It was bred in the bone 
and flesh of every old-time Southern boy thai 
upon this word of personal faith the gentleman 
must take his stand, and at whatever cost of com- 
fort or convenience or self-denial or sacrifice, 
even to the death, he must make it good. Such 
was the code of honor upon its business side. 

There was another illustration of the code of 
a more somber kind, now many years obsolete. 
It was by the crack of pistol and flash of sword 
that in the old time not infrequently were de- 
termined the fine points of honor. Long ago this 
28 



THE OLD SOUTH 



"code duello," with its Hotspur partisans, passed 
away, and I thank God for the gentler spirit that 
has come in its stead. With all of its blood and 
brutality, however, it had one merit which I am 
frank to allow it. It compelled one to circum- 
spection in what he said and did, or it made him 
pay instant price for his wrongdoing. It dif- 
ferentiated the man of courage from the bully 
and the sneak, and it set in bold relief the marks 
of the gentleman. I am glad to say, too, that dur- 
ing the long and evil reign of the code duello 
satisfaction in money and by damage suits at law 
was not as popular as now. The Kentuckian 
whose bloody face provoked the inquiry, "What 
ails you ?" answered by the code and card when 
he replied, "I called a gentleman a liar." The 
kind of gentleman who would salve the wounded 
honor of his person or family by a check was 
unknown or unrecognized before the war. 

If one wishes to see the old-time planter at 
his best, he will find him as the pencils of Page, 
Harris, and Hopkinson Smith have drawn him — 
courtly, genial, warm-hearted, gracious, proud 
of his family, boastful of his ancestral line, a 
lover of gun and dog and horse and mint julep, 

39 



THE OLD SOUTH 



an incomparable mixer in the society of well- 
bred ladies and gentlemen, as unique and dis- 
tinguished a figure as ever graced the ball or 
banquet room, the political forum, or the field 
of honor. His race will soon be extinct, and 
only the kindly voice and pen of those who knew 
him and loved him in spite of his weaknesses 
will truly perpetuate his memory. For two 
hundred years and more his was the conspicuous 
and unrivaled figure upon the social and polit- 
ical stage of our history. The good that he did 
lives after him ; may the evil be interred with his 
bones ! 



SIDE by side with the aristocrat, waiting def- 
erentially to do his bidding, with a grace and 
courtliness hardly surpassed by his master, I 
place the negro servant of the Old South. If 
one figure was unique, the other is not less so. 
Either figure in the passing throng would quick- 
ly arrest your attention. I am frank to confess 
to a tender feeling for those faithful black serv- 
itors of t:.e Old South— the "Uncle Remuses" 
30 



THE OLD SOUTH 



and "Aunt Chloes" of picture and poetry. On 
the great plantations, in their picturesque col- 
ors, in constant laughter and good nature, well 
fed and clothed and generally well-kept and mod- 
erately worked, the negro of slavery lived his 
careless, heart-free life. The specter of hunger 
and want never disquieted him. His cabin, cloth- 
ing, food, garden, pocket money, and holidays 
came without his concern. I think I state the truth 
when I say that for the millions of slaves of the 
Old South there were fewer heartaches than 
ever troubled a race of people. Freedom may 
be an inestimable boon. I know that poet and 
orator have so declared. But when I look upon 
the care-worn faces of the remnant of old- 
time negroes who have been testing freedom for 
a generation and have found it full of heartache 
and worry, I take exception to the much-vaunted 
doctrine of liberty as the panacea for all human 
ills. An old darky, with white head and shuf- 
fling feet and haunted look in his eyes, stopped 
the other day at the door of my office, and, after 
the manner of the old days, his cap in hand, 
asked "if massa could give the old nigger a 
dime ?" Something in my voice or manner must 
31 



THE OLD SOUTH 



have intimated to him that, like him, I belonged 
to the old order, as he said: "It's all right for 
some folks, dis thing they calls freedom; but 
God knows Vd be glad to see the old days once 
more before I die." Freedom to him, and to 
others like him, had proven a cheat and a snare. 
I have no word of apology or defense for slav- 
ery. Long ago I thanked God that it was no 
longer lawful for one human being to hold 
another in enforced servitude. But a genera- 
tion or more of free negroes has been our most 
familiar object-lesson, and the outcome is painful 
at best. The negro who commands respect in 
the South to-day, as a rule, is the negro who was 
born and trained under slavery. The new gen- 
eration, those who have known nothing but free- 
dom, it is charity to say, are an unsatisfactory 
body of people generally. Whenever you find a 
negro whose education comes not from books 
and college only, but from the example and home 
teaching and training of his white master and 
mistress, you will generally find one who speaks 
the truth, is honest, self-respecting and self-re- 
straining, docile and reverent, and always the 
friend of the Southern white gentleman and lady. 
32 




CONFEDERATE MONUMENT. 



THE OLD SOUTH 



Here and there in the homes of the New South 
these graduates from the school of slavery are to 
be found in the service of old families and their 
descendants, and the relationship is one of pecul- 
iar confidence and affection; and this old-time 
darky, wherever you find him in his integrity, 
pride, and industry, is in bold contrast with the 
post-bellum negro, despite his educational oppor- 
tunity. Living as I do in a city famed for its ne- 
gro schools, I have tried to observe fairly, and in- 
deed with strong predilection in their favor, the 
processes and results of negro education. Son of 
an abolitionist of the Henry Clay school, I have 
sincerely wanted to see the negro succeed educa- 
tionally and take his place with other men in skill 
and service. If any city of the South should be the 
first to confirm the negro's fitness for an educa- 
tion and his increase in value and in character 
as the subject of it, I thought it but fair to ex- 
pect it of a city famous for its colored universi- 
ties. But, with honorable exceptions to the rule, 
the negro of post-bellum birth and education in 
this city is usually a thorn in the flesh to one 
who seeks or uses his service, no matter what 
that service may be. "We don't have to work 
3 33 



THE OLD SOUTH 



any more," said one recently; "we are getting 
educated." Yet when one of the darky patri- 
archs of the Old South died the other day, a lead- 
ing daily paper, in a tender and beautiful edi- 
torial, noted how this colored gentleman of the 
old school, after a long life of honor and trust, 
with hundreds of thousands of dollars passing 
through his hands as confidential messenger, had 
won the respect of all men by the sheer nobility 
of his life. 

Perhaps the education of hand and foot and 
eye — the manual training schemes of Booker 
Washington and other like negro educators — 
may suffice to avert the degeneracy of the youn- 
ger negro race. The trouble, however, is that 
many of these are not enamored of hard work 
and constant labor. They turn their backs upon 
ax and saw and plow which the white man of- 
fers them along with ample wages, and prefer the 
negro barroom and the crap table. After forty 
years have gone, and millions of money have 
been expended by both Northern and Southern 
whites in an effort to educate and train him for 
profitable service, the negro is found practically 
in two classes — the larger class massed in the 
34 



THE OLD SOUTH 



cities and towns, too often despising and shirk- 
ing work except as compelled to it by sheer ne- 
cessity; the other class consisting of those who 
are not ashamed of any kind of work in field, 
factory, or shop, the significant thing being that 
those who want work and are doing it are com- 
monly the negroes with little or no education, 
while those who are shunning work are usually 
of the so-called educated class. 

I am not surprised at the failure of the negro's 
secular education to make him a good and prof- 
itable citizen. It is only another illustration of 
the folly of trying to sharpen the intellect and 
leave untrained the heart and conscience. The 
Old South, by contact, example, and precept, 
put a conscience and a sense of right and hon- 
orable living into its slaves. The New South 
is largely filling them with books. The negro 
of the Old South was religious, genuinely so, 
though by reason of his emotional nature his 
religion was often a matter of feeling. But such 
religion as he had he got from white teachers 
and preachers, and it was real and scriptural. 
It bound him to tell the truth, to lie not, to be 
sober and honest, and to do no man wrong. 
35 



THE OLD SOUTH 



How well the negro learned and practiced this 
old-fashioned religion of slavery, let two facts 
attest. First, few negroes thus trained in the 
Old South, so far as the speaker knows, have 
suffered by rope or fagot for the unnamable 
crime that so often has marked the negro of 
the New South. If there be exceptions to this 
rule, certainly they are exceedingly rare. Sec- 
ondly, at a time when every white man and even 
white boys were at the front fighting the battles 
of the Confederacy, the wives and mothers and 
children of the soldiers were cared for loyally 
and devotedly by the negro slaves to an extent 
unmatched in the history of the world. Such 
was the honor and conscience of the negro slaves 
that they watched over the helpless women and 
children of those who were engaged in a conflict 
involving their own slavery. 

What the negro needs more than books and 
college curriculum is a conscience. He needs 
religion of the genuine, transforming kind that 
will stop his petty thieving, his street corner 
loafing, and his tendencies toward the barbarism 
from which in the Old South religion wrested 
his fathers. I think the time has come when our 
36 



THE OLD SOUTH 



Southern white churches should turn again 
toward the negro and help him as far as pos- 
sible to a knowledge of pure and undefiled reli- 
gion, after the example of such ministry as that 
of Capers and Andrew to the slaves. If I find 
any fault with ourselves in our relationships 
with the negro, it is that we too easily conceded 
that the negro's moral and religious interests 
should be taken out of our hands since the war 
by sentimentalists, or by those whose labors 
among the negroes were inspired by political 
rather than by genuinely benevolent motives. 
Once politics is no longer an ally to the negro, 
and White House favors are not permitted to 
turn his head, I have some hope that the South- 
ern white and the negro may come together in 
peace and mutual aifection under the power of 
the gospel of Jesus Christ, and after an alien- 
ation of more than a generation may take up 
again the old order of religious instruction and 
training, which the white fathers of the Old 
South were so zealous to give and which the 
black servants were so eager to receive. When 
a young pastor came to me a few weeks ago 
asking an opinion upon the fact that, in response 
37 



THE OLD SOUTH 



to a request from a score or more of families of 
negroes on his charge who were without church 
and other religious facilities, he and his wife 
had formed their children into a Sunday school 
and the teachers of his white school were giving 
them faithful and intelligent instruction every 
Sabbath, I saw in the incident an intimation of 
what the New South must do if it w^ould re- 
store the lost negro conscience of the Old South. 
I cannot dismiss this passing glance at the 
social life of the Old South without a sense of 
abiding regret that it is gone forever. My last 
personal contact with it was the Christmas just 
preceding the war. Though the air was thick 
with rumors of impending strife, no gun as yet 
had broken the quiet of a land so full of peace 
and prosperity. I think the merriment of those 
last holidays of '6i v\^as greater than ever 
before. I recall it all the more vividly because 
it was the last old-fashioned Christmas that 
came to my boyhood, as it was the last that came 
to the Old South. For weeks preceding it ev- 
erything on the old plantation was full of stir and 
preparation. Holly and mistletoe and cedar 
were being put about the rooms of the big house 
38 



THE OLD SOUTH 



to welcome home the boys and girls from school. 
Secret councils were being held as to the Christ- 
mas gifts that were to be given religiously to 
every one, white and black. The back yard was 
piled up with loads of oak and hickory to make 
bright and warm the Christmas nights. The ne- 
gro seamstresses were busy making new suits 
and dresses for all the servants. The master 
of the plantation was figuring up the accounts of 
the year and making ready for generous drafts 
upon his ready money. There was an increasing 
rustle of excitement and happiness that ran from 
the gray-haired grandfather and mother down to 
the smallest pickaninny in the remotest negro 
cabin. The peace and goodness of God seemed 
to brood over it all. The stately plantation home, 
with its lofty white columns, its big rooms, its 
great fireplaces, opened wide to all sons and 
daughters and grandchildren, uncles and aunts, 
nephews and nieces. We poured into it; and if 
ever heaven came close to earth and mingled 
with it, I think it was that Christmas Eve when 
the last wanderer and exile had come and the 
grace was said at the great table by a gray- 
haired patriarch of the Old South. There was 
39 



THE OLD SOUTH 



little sleep for small boys and girls, and long be- 
fore daylight of Christmas shone in upon us 
we were scurrying from room to room crying, 
"Christmas gift!" to which, whenever first spo- 
ken by child or dependent, there could be but 
the one gracious response. Out on the back 
porches the negroes were waiting in grinning 
rows to follow our example, and many were the 
dusky faces that beamed with delight over their 
never-failing Christmas remembrances. Down 
in the cabins and up in the big halls of the man- 
sion the lights and fires burned the entire week, 
and there was nothing that could eat that was 
not surfeited with the world of eatables made 
ready. I must beg pardon of the W. C. T. U., 
which had not then begun its beneficent prohib- 
itory career, if I recall the big flowing bowl of 
eggnog, renewed daily and served generously 
to all. I know that this old-time Christmas bev- 
erage is growing into disrepute, for which I 
am sincerely glad, but I confess to a sort of car- 
nal delight of memory when I recall how good 
it tasted to the average small boy on an early 
Christmas morning. 

40 



H-^i 




JEFFERSON DAVIS. 



THE OLD SOUTH 



THE Old South intellectually was a fitting 
complement to its unique social system. The 
charge has often been made against it that it pro- 
duced few if any great writers and left no lasting 
impress upon the literature of the times. If this 
were true, it could be answered that the Old 
South was true to its distinctive mission. It 
needed to produce great thinkers, and it produced 
them, as the half-century of its dominating lead- 
ership attests. An Elizabethan age, with its co- 
terie of great writers, comes to any nation only 
at long intervals, and under conditions which 
are of providential rather than of human order- 
ing. The Southern man, by tradition, inherit- 
ance, and choice, and by virtue of a certain 
philosophic temper which seemed to inhere in 
his race, was trained to think and to speak clear- 
ly, and especially upon grave matters of public 
import. He was a born politician in the best 
sense of that much-abused term. Like Hanni- 
bal, he was led early in life to the altars of his 
country and dedicated to its service. He cov- 
eted the power and the authority of the rostrum 
rather than the pen. In the beauty of field and 
forest, of bright stream and blossoming flower, 
41 



THE OLD SOUTH 



of song and sunshine, or in the historic inci- 
dents of the Old South, he had ample inspira- 
tion and material for his pen, if he had cared 
to use it. But it was ever his ambition and de- 
light to stand before his countrymen on some 
great public day, and set forth the length and 
breadth of some great argument, patiently stud- 
ied and thought out in his library and now made 
luminous and inspiring to the listening multi- 
tude. If it were true that the South had no 
great writers, I could even content myself by 
recalling how, when one of its briUiant thinkers 
and orators cast his spell upon the culture of 
old Boston, the finest editorial writer of that 
city of writers placed over his leading editorial 
the next morning the question, "What could be 
finer?" 

While it was true of the Old South that mem- 
bers of its learned professions commonly dallied 
with the Muses, there was no distinctive profes- 
sion of letters. The professional poet, histo- 
rian, and maker of fiction, and publisher and sell- 
er of books, were scarcely known. A rural peo- 
ple, a relatively sparse population of readers, 
the absence of great cities, the concentration of 
42 



THE OLD SOUTH 



thought and learning upon politics and plans of 
government, the entire lack of commercialism 
as a motive to literary production, were reasons 
why the Old South contributed comparatively 
little per se to the stock of permanent literature. 
There was another hindrance in the fact, which 
I do not like to recall, that the South, in mis- 
taken largeness of heart or short-sightedness of 
vision, fell upon two ways that lowered its own 
self-respect and dwarfed the good it might have 
attained. It set up a fashion, on the one hand, of 
reading and patronizing alien books, and ac- 
counted these foreign literary products as better 
than its own. And along with this same mis- 
taken fondness for foreign literary wares, it be- 
gan to slight its own struggling colleges and 
schools, and to send its sons and daughters else- 
where for a culture not superior to that pro- 
curable at its own doors. 

Yet with such admitted weaknesses, let no one 
suppose for an instant that the ability to write or 
think or speak worthy of the finest culture was 
in any wise wanting to the gentleman of the Old 
South. Enter his library, and you would find 
what is becoming rare in the New South, but 
43 



THE OLD SOUTH 



which was the mark of the gentleman of the Old 
South — the finest and completest array of costly 
books upon all subjects, ranging through science, 
art, literature, theology, biography, history, and 
politics. Nothing that money could buy or 
trained scholarship select was omitted. A man's 
books were his most intimate friends and com- 
rades, and such was the wide range and patient 
study of the average gentleman of the Old South 
that wits and savants vied in paying tribute to 
his varied and scholarly attainments. In sin- 
gular contrast, the other day one of our literary 
leaders, discussing the scanty sale of really val- 
uable books, bemoaned the fact that the South- 
ern gentleman's library is fast becoming extinct. 
One feature of scholarship that was peculiar to 
the Old South was the general and thorough 
devotion to, and mastery of, the classics. I 
doubt if ever the youth of any country were so 
well grounded in the literature of Greek and 
Latin poet and historian, or caught so fully and 
finely the beauty of the old philosophies and 
mythologies. It was not an uncommon feat for 
a boy of fourteen, upon entrance as a freshman 
to a college of the old order, to read Virgil and 
44 



THE OLD SOUTH 



Horace ore rotundo, with a grace and finish that 
would do credit to a post-bellum alumnus. Lat- 
in, Greek, and the higher mathematics, with a 
modicum of the physical sciences, constituted the 
favored curriculum of the old-time academy and 
college. How much some of us owe to that an- 
cient academy and that small college can never 
be rightly estimated. The standard of study 
was severe and thorough. The discipline was 
often rigorous and exacting. What, for instance, 
would our latter-day college boys think of 
a rule compelling their attendance, if within a 
mile of the chapel, upon sunrise prayer the year 
round? Or how would a shudder run through 
their ranks if I paused to tell them of how in our 
old Academy two score of us classical students, 
ranging in age from fifteen to thirty years, hav- 
ing been discovered demolishing the business 
signs of town merchants in an effort to fulfill 
the Scriptures which declared that they should 
seek a sign and none should be given unto them, 
were soundly thrashed with exceeding rough- 
ness and dispatch by the man who for many 
years has held the superintendency of public 
schools in the foremost city of the South ! Alas 
45 



THE OLD SOUTH 



for the disappearance of those good old days 
and customs, of which the survivors have feeling 
and pathetic remembrance ! For one, I am glad 
that free public education has come to the chil- 
dren, white and black, of the New South. 
Whether the hopes of the statesman and philan- 
thropist shall be realized or not, I am also glad 
of the millions of money the New South has 
expended in the past generation upon the educa- 
tion of the masses. But the day of the ancient 
academy and college, as source and inspiration of 
an incomparable culture, will never be surpassed 
by latter-day educational systems, however wide- 
ly extended and beneficent these may be. There 
was something intensely stimulating in the spirit 
and method of the old classical school; a sharp 
yet generous competition and rivalry of scholar- 
ship ; a thoroughness that reached the foundation 
of every subject traversed; and above and 
through it all there was the sure development 
of a sense of honor and a pride of scholarship 
that lifted even the dull student into an ambi- 
tion to succeed. Mixed with all was the exam- 
ple and influence of high-bred Christian gentle- 
men as professors and teachers, whose lives re- 
46 



THE OLD SOUTH 



enforced their teachings and molded us into the 
image of the gentleman of the Old South. The 
utilitarian in education was not yet in evidence. 
The bread-and-butter argument was reserved to 
a later generation. The cheap and tawdry "busi- 
ness college," recruited from guileless country 
youth ambitious to become merchant princes and 
railroad managers by a six months' course in 
double entry and lightning arithmetic, had not 
then entered upon its dazzling career. Boys 
were trained to read extensively, to think clear- 
ly, to analyze patiently, to judge critically, to 
debate accurately and fluently, and in short to 
master whatever subject one might come upon. 
Over that old-time educational method might 
be written the aphorism of Quintilian, that "not 
what one may remember constitutes knowledge, 
but what one cannot forget." 



WE were not without noble intellectual ex- 
emplars in our Old South. The great 
thoughts of our home-born leaders, from Patrick 
Henry to Calhoun and Clay, were ever before us. 
47 



THE OLD SOUTH 



Our college debates, our commencement orations, 
were fashioned after the severely classical mod- 
els these men had left us. From the rostrum, 
the party platform, the pulpit, whenever a man 
spoke in those days it was expected and de- 
manded that his speech be chaste, his thought 
elevated, his purpose ennobling. We were old- 
fashioned, I admit, in theme and method. We 
did not aim so much to please and entertain as 
to convince and inspire. The forum was as sa- 
cred as in the palmiest days of Athens and De- 
mosthenes. About it centered our chief ambi* 
tions. We had not come upon a degenerate age 
when a much-exploited college graduate, lyceum 
lecturer, and "D.D." — as I heard him before a 
great audience of university young gentlemen and 
ladies the other day — could descend to a con- 
temptible buffoonery of delineation of the "Amer- 
ican Girl" as his theme, and include in his printed 
repertoire such subjects as "The Tune the Old 
Cow Died of," which confirmed some of us who 
heard him in the conviction that Balaam's ass is 
yet lineally represented in ways of public speech 
and action. 

Of the great writers and orators who left their 
48 




ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS. 



THE OLD SOUTH 



impress upon us in the last years of the Old 
South, I can speak from personal contact and ex- 
perience, and with thankfulness that as a boy I 
was given to see rnost of them face to face and 
to touch, in spirit, the hem of their garments. 
The spell of the genius of Edgar Allan Poe, 
though the fitful fever of his life had ended, was 
upon the literature and literary men of the time. 
The weird beauty of the lines of this prince of 
the powers of harmony, contrasting so wonder- 
fully with a strange analytical power that made 
him at once a foremost prose and poetical writer 
of his century, had set before us the measure of 
beauty and the test of genius. Then, in our own 
day, came Paul Hamilton Hayne, Henry Timrod, 
and Sidney Lanier. I cannot describe to you the 
feeling of ownership that we of the Old South 
felt in this trinity of noble singers; nor can I 
express the sense of tenderness that comes to me 
as I recall the pain and poverty that haunted 
them most of their days until the end came, to 
two of them at leasts in utter destitution. It was 
my privilege early in life to fall under the spell 
of the minstrelsy of these three men. As long 
as the red hills of Georgia stand, and its over- 
4 49 



THE OLD SOUTH 



hanging pines are stirred by the south wind's 
sighing, let it recall to the honorable and grate- 
ful remembrance of Georgians the gentle yet 
proud-spirited poet who, having lost all but hon- 
or and genius in his native sea-girt city, came to 
his rude cabin home at Copse Hill as the weary 
pilgrim of whom he so tenderly sings: 

With broken staff and tattered shoon, 
I wander slow from dawn to noon — 
From arid noon till, dew-impearled, 
Pale twilight steals across the world. 
Yet sometimes through dim evening calms 
I catch the gleam of distant palms; 
And hear, far off, a mystic sea. 
Divine as waves on Galilee. 
Perchance through paths unknown, forlorn, 
I still may reach an Orient morn; 
To rest where Easter breezes stir 
Around the sacred sepulcher. 

I know what a fashion it is to worship at the 
shrines of the "Lake poets," and how Words- 
worth and Burns and Shelley and like singers 
of the Old World, with Longfellow, Whittier, and 
Lowell of the New, are set on high as the greater 
masters of poesy. But if genius is a thing of 
quality rather than quantity, I go back to the 
so 



THE OLD SOUTH 



dark days and memories of battle and take my 
stand lovingly beside the new-made grave of 
Timrod, the poet laureate of the Confederacy, 
and call to mind v\^hat I believe to be a poem 
that the greatest of English and American poets 
would be glad to claim as their own. Remem- 
ber, as you read it, how in his dire want the 
poet wrote of the little book of which it is a 
part: "I would consign every line of it to ob- 
livion for one hundred dollars in hand." 

Spring, with that nameless pathos in the air 

Which dwells with all things fair; 
Spring, with her golden suns and silver rains, 

Is with us once again. 

Still there's a sense of blossoms yet unborn 

In the sweet airs of morn ; 
One almost looks to see the very street 

Grow purple at his feet. 
At times a fragrant breeze comes floating by, 

And brings — you know not why — 
A feeling as when eager crowds await 

Before a palace gate 
Some wondrous pageant ; and you scarce would start. 

If from a beech's heart 
A blue-eyed Dryad, stepping forth, should say : 

"Behold me! I am May!" 

51 



THE OLD SOUTH 



Sidney Lanier was of the Old South, though 
fame came to him from the New. It was fitting 
that the latest of the progeny of genius of the 
Old South should become the foremost of those 
who were to gild it with a fame imperishable. 
Born in Georgia, less than a score of years be- 
fore the tragedy of the Old South began, writ- 
ing his earliest poems as a boy in Confederate 
camp and Federal prison, his music tinged with 
the somberness of the time, Lanier's genius was 
like the last of the Southern flowers that burst 
into bloom just before the coming of chilling 
frost and wintr}?- wind. It was like the bright- 
red flower of war which he describes : 'The early 
spring of 1861 brought to bloom, besides innu- 
merable violets and jessamines, a strange, enor- 
mous, and terrible flower, the blood-red flower of 
war, which grows amid the thunders." Why it is 
that the price of genius must always be paid in 
blood, I do not know ; but not all the transmitted 
genius and culture and spirit of the Old South, 
which crystallized in this last and greatest of her 
literary children, could absolve Lanier from the 
pangs which Southern genius seems peculiarly 
called upon to suffer. As the holiest and brav- 
52 



THE OLD SOUTH 



est lives spring out of darkness and storm and 
sorrow, it may be that only such baptism of tears 
and blood which we as a people have received 
could fit our sons and daughters for their high 
vocation. 

Lanier was easily the greatest of the poets of 
the South. Perhaps his final place is yet to be 
fixed among the greater singers of America, but 
it is comforting to know that the clear light of 
dispassionate judgment of the receding years dis- 
pels the first-formed prejudices, and lifts the 
singer into nobler and yet nobler place. 

Broken with pain and poverty, yearning un- 
utterably for the peace and quiet of an oppor- 
tunity to pour out his divine genius in great and 
holy song, could anything be more utterly pitiful 
than this passionate cry for help, which lay 
among his papers after his death ? 

Lord, if thou wert needy as I, 

If thou shouldst come to my door as I to thine ; 

If thou hungered so much as I 

For that which belongs to the spirit, 

For that which is fine and good, 

Ah, friend, for that which is fine and good, 

1 would give it to thee if I had power. 

"A thousand songs are singing in my heart," he 
53 



THE OLD SOUTH 



declares, "that will certainly kill me if I do not 
utter them soon." 

Lanier's genius was many-sided, and there is 
not a line he wrote of poetry or prose that one 
would care to blot. He had the exquisite sense 
of melody of Poe, but he had what Poe did not 
in the spirit of the maxim of his art which he 
often expressed in the words: "The beauty of 
holiness and the holiness of beauty." He had, 
too, the tenderness and pathos and lyrical beauty 
of Timrod and Haynes, yet the characteristic of 
his poems is that they call one to worship God. 
They usher us with bowed head and chastened 
spirit into the holy of holies. "A holy tune was 
in my soul when I fell asleep," he writes ; "it was 
going when I awoke." 

Just as in the ancient mythology, while one of 
divine descent might hold converse for a time 
with sons and daughters of men unmarked or 
unrecognized, yet by glance of eye or grace of 
motion would inevitably betray himself as of 
the progeny of the gods, so if ever for a mo- 
ment I were in doubt as to the genius of Lanier 
my doubt would vanish as in the darkness, with 
bowed head and pitying heart of love, I sang 
54 



THE OLD SOUTH 



to myself his "Ballad of the Trees and the 
Master :" 

Into the woods my Master went, 
Clean forspent, forspent. 

Into the woods my Master came, 

Forspent with love and shame. 
But the olives they were not blind to him, 
The little gray leaves were kind to him, 
The thorn tree had a mind to him, 

When into the woods he came. 

Out of the woods my Master went. 
And he was well content. 

Out of the woods my Master came, 

Content with death and shame. 
When death and shame would woo him last, 
From under the trees they drew him — last ; 
'Twas on a tree they slew him — last, 

When out of the woods he came. 



ONE of the aphorisms of my youth was, 
"Poeta nascitur, orator fit." That the poet 
is "born," and ever bears upon himself the marks 
of his divine enduement, I do not doubt ; but that 
the orator "becomes" or happens so by chance or 
labor, I must strongly deny. A certain fluency 
55 



THE OLD SOUTH 



of speech, a certain gloss of oratory, may possi- 
bly be achieved by dint of elocutionary drill and 
practice. If one is minded, like orators of an 
elegant postprandial type, to stand before a 
mirror and practice the tricks of gesture and 
speech, he may hope to attain applause from 
those whose blood is kept well cooled by the ices 
of the banquet room. I have described it fitting- 
ly as "postprandial'' oratory, for the reason that 
it is most appreciated when the stomach and not 
the brain is chiefly in operation. 

But if any one as a boy had ever sat under 
the matchless spell of the real masters of the 
forum, those who were as fully ''born" unto it 
as was Lanier to poetry or Blind Tom to music ; 
if within a half score of years he had been per- 
mitted to hear in their prime Jefferson Davis, 
Robert Toombs, Ben Hill, Alexander Stephens, 
Judge Lamar, and William L. Yancey, the after- 
dinner elegancies of oratory of the class I have 
named would be tame and dispiriting. I would 
not underrate the men of later fame, but I am 
sure that it is not time and distance only that 
lend enchantment to the names of that galaxy 
of famous orators who closed the succession 
56 



THE OLD SOUTH 



of platform princes of the Old South. I would 
not detract an iota from whatever claim the New 
South may have to oratory, but I stand firmly 
upon the proposition, self-evident to survivors of 
the Old South, that the golden a.8:-e of Southern 
oratory ended a generation ago. Compared with 
Yancey, the incarnate genius of oratory, any 
oration of that superb master of assemblies by 
the side of the best post-bellum oratory (always 
excepting Henry W. Grady) is as Hyperion to 
a satyr. 

On a day that no one who was present will 
ever forget, while the war clouds were gathering 
and old political issues were giving place to the 
one dominant and terrible question of the hour, 
in a little Southern city, within the compass of 
twelve hours I heard the greatest of the orators 
of the last tragic era of the Old South. Whig 
and Democrat were words to conjure with, and 
the old-fashioned custom of joint debate was yet 
in honor. The crux of an intense and hard- 
fought campaign was at hand, and only the plat- 
form giants of the contending parties were in 
demand for the occasion. From fifty to a hun- 
dred miles around, towns, without railroad com- 
57 



THE OLD SOUTH 



munication as now, poured their delegations in 
upon the crucial day of the campaign. For two 
days and nights in advance, processions with 
fife and drum and bands, cannon and cavalry, had 
held rival parade. The fires of a great barbecue, 
with its long lines of parallel trenches in which, 
under the unbroken vigilance of expert negro 
cooks, whole beeves and sheep and hogs and in- 
numerable turkeys were roasting, sent forth a 
savor that would have tempted the dainty palate 
of an Epicurus. Floats were formed, and fair 
young women and rosy-cheeked children ex- 
pressed in symbol the doctrines of their sires, and 
sang to us until our hearts were all aglow. To 
the small boy there were meat and drink, sights 
and sounds illimitable, and a tenseness of ex- 
citement that thrilled him with a thousand thrills, 
for in the presence and sound of the great men 
of his country the boy's heart must expand and 
his ambition take fire. 

Not in a hundred years could I forget the 
speeches and speakers of that eventful day. 
Whole passages linger in memory now, fifty years 
after they were spoken. I recall the jubilant 
ring of Ben Hill as, lifting an old placard on 
58 



THE OLD SOUTH 



which was inscribed, ''Buck, Breck, and Kan- 
sas," he said : "You got your Buck, you got your 
Breck, but where's your Kansas?" Or Brown- 
low, with the heavy thump of his fist on the 
table, declaring, "I would rather vote for the 
old clothes of Henry Clay, stuflfed with straw, 
than for any man living." Or Toombs, with 
massive head and lordly pose, denouncing in 
blistering speech the unholy alliance of certain 
men of the Old South with the enemies of its 
most vital institution. Or Stephens, small and 
weazened, sallow and unkempt, with cigar stump 
in hand, his thin, metallic voice penetrating with 
strange power to the remotest part of the great 
open-air assemblage. All day, back and forth, 
the battle of the giants raged. Toward nightfall 
the Democrats were in dire distress over the 
seeming victory of the opposition. Yancey lay 
sick at home, sixty miles away, and the wires 
v/ere kept hot with pleadings to bring him at any 
cost, if possible, to the scene. At nine o'clock 
that night I saw a strange tribute to the power 
of that orator, who, I doubt not, will stand un- 
rivaled in the future as in the past. Pale and 
emaciated, taken from his sick room and hur- 
59 



THE OLD SOUTH 



ried by special train, upborne upon the shoulders 
of men whose idol he had been for twenty years, 
he was carried to the platform at the close of 
a day's great victory by the opposing parity. 
Vs^ith singularly musical voice and an indefinable 
magnetism which fell upon all of us, he began 
a speech of two hours' length. Within an hour, 
such was the magic of the man, he had turned 
the tide of defeat, rallied his party, and filled 
them with hope and courage. Within another 
hour he was receiving the tremendous applause 
of even his political enemies, and had undone 
all the mighty work of the giants of the opposi- 
tion and sent them home with a chill at heart. 

With such political leaders as these men, and 
with the finest intellect and character of the Old 
South devoted for generations to the study and 
exposition of the purest party politics, I am not 
surprised at the higher level of parties and plat- 
forms of the Old South. Politics was not a 
"graft," as the present-day political ringster de- 
fines it. The political and personal conscience 
were one and the same, and a man's politics was 
no small part of his religion. I am not sav- 
ing that all political leaders were incorrupt- 
60 



THE OLD SOUTH 



ible statesmen, or that an unselfish patriot- 
ism was the invariable mark of its party politics. 
The demagogue was not unknown, and the fine 
Italian hand of the mercenary was sometimes in 
evidence. But of one fact I am abundantly as- 
sured — the spoilsman and the grafter held no 
recognized and official standing in that old- 
time democracy. Men of ability and character 
might aspire to political place and honor. They 
might even go beyond the personal desire and 
become open candidates for party favor. But 
the service of the paid political manager, the 
conciliation of the party "boss," the subsidizing 
of the party "heelers," the utilization of the party 
press in flaming, self-laudatory columns and even 
pages of paid advertising matter, ad nauseam and 
ad infinitum, as in recent Southern political con- 
tests — all these latter-day importations and in- 
ventions of "peanut" pohtics would have merited 
and received the unmeasured contempt of the 
politicians of the Old South. There were cer- 
tain old-fashioned political maxims that consti- 
tuted the code of every man who would become 
a candidate for office, as, for instance, "The of- 
fice should seek the man, not the man the office." 
6i 



THE OLD SOUTH 



I cannot find heart to censure the politician of the 
New South for his smile at the verdancy and 
guilelessness of such a maxim, but that which 
provokes a smile was in my own remembered 
years the working motto of the old-time South- 
ern leaders of high rank. Another maxim was 
that "the patriot may impoverish but not enrich :^ 
himself by office-holding." As a commentary ' 
upon this maxim, it affords me infinite satisfac- 
tion, in a retrospect of the long line of men who 
led the great political campaigns of the Old 
South and held its positions of highest trust, that 
m-ost of them died poor, that none of them with- 
in my knowledge were charged with converting 
public office into private gain, and that the high- 
est ambition of the old-time poHtician was to 
serve his country by some great deed of unselfish 
patriotism, to live like a gentleman, and then to 
die with uncorrupted heart and hands, and with 
money enough to insure a decent burial. If he 
left a few debts here and there, they were grate- 
fully cherished as souvenirs by his host of friends. 
Earlier in these pages I raised the question 
as to why the South, once so potent in national 
council and leadership, was now become the 
62 



THE OLD SOUTH 



mere servant of the national Democratic party, 
so much so that the recognized Sir Oracle of 
Republicanism and mouthpiece of his excellency 
the President is led to remind us, while a guest 
on Southern soil, of our pristine place and pow- 
er, and to admonish us, in the frankness of an 
open and worthy foeman, to quit playing the 
role of lackey in national politics, and to put 
forth as of yore our own home-grown statesmen 
for national positions of highest honor and serv- 
ice, and to do all in our might again to restore 
the lost political prestige of the South. Come 
from whomsoever it may, Republican or Dem- 
ocrat, Grosvenor or Grant — for the latter before 
his death held like view with the former — the 
advice is well given and the point well taken. 
But when once the renaissance begins, I think 
the Augean stable of latter-day politics, even in 
the New South, will need another Hercules to 
purify it. Take, for instance, this statement from 
a recent issue of a great Southern newspaper: 
"The four candidates for railroad commissioner 
expended a total of $14,940.80 on their cam- 
paign expenses, Mr. , who was nominated, 

leading with $10,522.80. The twelve candidates 
63 



THE OLD SOUTH 



for the Supreme Court paid out $7,133.34. Six- 
teen Congressional candidates expended $i5r 
965.88." 

In the Independent of recent date a leading 
Democratic manufacturer of New Jersey, under 
manifestly strong grievance, recites his experi- 
ences as a delegate in the State Democratic 
Convention, in which a vigorous effort was made, 
as in other Democratic Conventions, to force 
the indorsement of an unclean aspirant to the 
highest office of the republic. The article I cite 
is an evident instance of pot and kettle, but it 
sets in bold relief the straits and methods to 
which the dominating wing of the party of Jef- 
ferson and Jackson has been reduced, certainly 
in some of the Northern if not of the Southern 
States. I quote the closing paragraph of the 
article as a faithful picture of recent political 
happenings : 

What are the means used by the bosses? First, 
corrupted judges at the primaries and bulldozing tac- 
tics there. Secondly, a brow-beating county and del- 
egation chairman, with his attendant thugs. Thirdly, 
a properly managed credentials committee, with ar- 
rangements made beforehand, so that there will be con-^ 

64 



THE OLD SOUTH 



tests and the contests decided their way. Fourthly, a 
tactful chairman, who will have fine presence, be 
a hypocrite and pretend to fairness, but never recog- 
nize any but machine men. Fifthly, the presence 
of the boss, with his ever-ready check book and a fine 
knowledge of men to know what he must do to win 
his way with them. 

In so far as this is a true picture of the dom- 
inant spirit and method of no small part of the 
Northern Democracy, and I firmly believe it so to 
be, I think it time for the South to first purge it- 
self of the contamination that has come from 
thirty years of subserviency and emasculation, 
and then to assert and maintain the integrity and 
high principles of the Democracy of the fathers. 
If ever thieves and money changers were 
scourged from the ancient temple, it is high time 
that the lash of public scorn shall be laid upon 
the backs of all men. North or South, who have 
helped to disrtipt and dishonor a once noble and 
victorious national party. When I remember, as 
a Confederate soldier, that William McKinley — 
peace to his dust — in the city of Atlanta, as Re- 
publican President, pleaded for equal recogni- 
tion of Confederate with Federal dead; and that 
5 65 



THE OLD SOUTH 



one who has been honored by the Democratic 
party as standard bearer and occupant of a great 
office declined to vote for an ex-Confederate 
candidate in fear of the disfavor of his Western 
constituency ; and when within recent months, in 
great cities of the South, I have personally seen 
the cunning handiwork of paid henchmen of a 
millionaire saffron newsmonger seeking most in- 
sistently and offensively to buy exalted position 
for their master, I am ready once more to secede, 
except that the second act of secession would be 
the sundering of all bonds that bind my party to 
corrupting methods and leadership, and the set- 
ting up again in the New South of the lofty 
political ideals and independency of the Democ- 
racy of the Old South. 



THUS far I have tried to portray, in frankly 
admitted partiality, the social, intellectual, 
and political characteristics of the Old South. 
But I should be seriously dereUct in my portrait- 
ure if I left unnoted that which was more to it 
than wealth or culture or learning or party. If the 
66 



THE OLD SOUTH 



Old South had one characteristic more than an- 
other, I think it was the reverent and religious 
life and atmosphere which diffused themselves 
among all classes of its people, whether cracker 
white or plantation prince or dusky slave. If 
I were asked to explain this atmosphere of re- 
ligion, I should hardly know where to begin. 
Perhaps its largely rural population and its 
peaceful agricultural pursuits predisposed to re- 
ligion the simple-minded people who made up 
the Old South. More than this, however, must 
have been due to the religious strain in the blood 
of the Cavalier, Huguenot, and God-fearing 
Scotch-Irish ancestry from which they sprang. 
Most of all, I think that the high examples of a 
godly profession and practice in the leaders of the 
Old South made it easy for each succeeding gen- 
eration to learn the first and noblest of all lessons 
— reverence for God, his Word, and His Church. 
And until this day the reverence of the Old 
South is constant in the New South. While 
New England, once the citadel of an orthodox 
Bible and Church and Sabbath, is now the prey 
of isms and innovations innumerable, and while 
the great West is marked by the painful contrast 
67 



THE OLD SOUTH 



between its big secular enterprises and its dimin- 
utive churches and congregations, the South has 
continued largely to be not only the acknowledged 
home of the only pure Americanism, but the cen- 
ter also of conservatism and reverence in the wor- 
ship of God and the maintenance of Christian 
institutions. 

In no section of our country has the Chris- 
tian Sabbath been so highly honored, Canada 
alone, with her reverently ordered day of rest, 
exceeding us in Sabbath observance. Here and 
there, however, is needed the cautionary signal of 
danger against the greed of railroad and other 
law-defying corporations, and the loose morality 
of aliens who come to us with money but without 
religious raising or conviction. In no other sec- 
tion is there such widely diffused catholicity of 
spirit and tolerance of differences among oppos- 
ing religious beliefs. If the Roman Catholic has 
been freer from, assault upon his religion in any 
country or time than in the South, I have failed 
to find it. If the Jew has as kindly treatment 
elsewhere under the sun, I should be glad to 
know it. And if there is as fine a courtesy and 
fraternity anywhere as among our Southern 
68 



THE OLD SOUTH 



Protestant bodies, I have yet to discover it. 
A few months ago, though of another denom- 
ination, I was called to their platform by the 
great Southern Baptist Assembly. A month be- 
fore that I was summoned by the Cumberland 
Presbyterian Seminary, of Lebanon, to instruct 
its young men. A month before that I was 
writing articles for the chief religious organ of 
the Southern Presbyterians. I have lived long 
enough and am familiar enough with other parts 
of the world to know that such practical cath- 
olicity chiefly obtains in the South. 

Nowhere as in the South do men so generally 
honor the house of God by their attendance and 
support. I make bold to say that upon any Sab- 
bath day by count more men may be found in 
churches in Richmond and Atlanta than in Chi- 
cago and New York, though the combined popu- 
lation of the latter cities is ten times that of the 
former. These same churchgoing men of the 
South, following in the footsteps of their God- 
fearing fathers, are the members and supporters 
of Southern Churches, and are quick to resent 
innovation or disturbance of the old order. No 
man is so reverent and courteous toward men 
69 



THE OLD SOUTH 



of the cloth as the men of the South, and wher- 
ever a minister of the gospel walks down the 
street of a Southern city or village, if worthy to 
wear the cloth of his sacred calling, he is the 
foremost man of his community in standing and 
influence. 

Why this relative respect to the minister and 
the Church, and this clinging to religious forms 
and traditions, those of us who came up out of 
the Old South understand. Any reverent spirit 
of the New South in matters of religion is an- 
other of the heritages from the Old South. 
Then as now, even more than now, with our 
leaders and great men it was religion first, pol- 
itics second, and money, or whatever money stood 
for, last and least. From my earliest recollec- 
tion and reading, the governors, senators, con- 
gressmen, judges, great lawyers, physicians, 
merchants, and planters were commonly Chris- 
tian men, both by profession and practice; and 
the man who was hostile or even indifferent to 
the Church and religion, however distinguished 
and brilliant he might be, was under ban of pub- 
He opinion. As a commentary upon this signifi- 
cant religious affiliation of Southern leadership I 
70 



THE OLD SOUTH 



carefully noted a few years ago, in two contrast- 
ing lists taken at random of governors and con- 
gressmen, that while one list had five men out 
of twenty-five who were members of Christian 
Churches, the Southern list of twenty-five con- 
tained eighteen. While I share in the wide- 
spread regret that our Southern young men are 
not as reverent as were those of a generation 
ago, and are often conspicuous by absence upon 
Sabbath worship, yet in view of such facts as I 
am recounting I am more hopeful of the solu- 
tion of the vexed problem of Christian young 
manhood in the South than in any other part of 
the land. 



1HAVE paid tribute to the great political ora- 
tors of the Old South. Let me pay higher 
tribute to its great preachers and pulpit orators, 
to whom, under God, more than to any other class 
or leadership, is due what the South has ever 
cherished as its best. There were giants in those 
days. If Yancey or Stephens could cast a spell 
upon a great political gathering, and play upon its 
71 



THE OLD SOUTH 



emotions as the harper plays upon the harp, 
George F. Pierce in his prime could stir men's 
hearts in a way that put to shame even the elo- 
quence of the political rostrum. The last time I 
heard this greatest of all the orators of the Old 
South was not far from the time of his death. 
Marvin, fittingly called the ''St. John of Meth- 
odism," sat in the pulpit behind him. To most of 
his audience Pierce and his preaching were known 
only by hearsay, and their firm belief was that 
Marvin was the real prince of the pulpit. I re- 
member how Pierce battled against his bodily 
weakness and weariness, and how there came to 
his eye that wondrous flash as his old-time elo- 
quence lifted him into heights and visions celes- 
tial. He was preaching of the pure faith once de- 
livered unto the saints, and pleading for the old 
order of simple gospel truth and living. He had 
something to say of the new order of ministers 
who were substituting doubts and denials for the 
long-cherished doctrines of the Church. His 
opening sentence was : "A single meteor flash- 
ing athwart the heavens will arrest a larger meas- 
ure of attention than the serene shining of a 
thousand planets." I think I know who the old 
72 




^ ^ 



-^' 




BISHOP GEORGE F. PIERCE. 



THE OLD SOUTH 



man eloquent meant. A little while before, a 
dapper preacher, consumed bv itch for popular- 
ity, had been dispensing a perfumed and smoke- 
less theology that drew great crowds and tickled 
the ears of the groundlings. The theology of 
the Old South was too crude and barbarous and 
imscientific for such as he. Genesis was an alle- 
gory, creation an evolution, man was pre- 
Adamic, the deluge was only a local shower, the 
Pentateuch was polychromatic, Moses was 
largely mythical, there were two Isaiahs, all the 
ante-exihan history and writings were concocted 
by pious post-exilian experts, the incarnation and 
resurrection were touching legends but "quite un- 
scientific," hell was "hades," and hades w^as a 
tolerably comfortable winter resort, and Bible 
inspiration, as a matter of fact, seldom inspired. 
Many times, in sight and sound of such dainty 
apostles of an emasculate Bible, have I longed 
for the ghosts of the stalwart preachers of my 
childhood — the Pierces, Thomas Sanford, Jef- 
ferson Hamilton, A. L. P. Green, P. P. Neely, 
Jesse Boring, McTyeire, Wightman, Summers, 
and the like — to rise up in their godly wrath and 
shake them over the flaming pit of a real old- 
73 



THE OLD SOUTH 



time, unabridged "hades" long enough to bring 
them to silence and repentance. 

Down in the straw, at the mourners' bench of 
an Old South camp meeting, some of us got our 
theology and our religion. The Bible, in miracle 
and prophecy, was handled by reverent hands, 
and made most real to us as the infallible word 
of Almighty God. The law of Sinai, with un- 
expurgated cursings and blessings, was read to 
us amid the groanings of our troubled con- 
sciences. No ear so polite, no position so ex- 
alted, but a living and burning hell was de- 
nounced against its meannesses. As deep as the 
virus of sin in our souls sank the flashing, two- 
edged sword of the Spirit. The wound was 
made purposely deep and wide that the balm of 
Gilead might enter and heal the utmost roots of 
sin. By and by, when John the Baptists, like 
Boring and Lovick Pierce, had cut to the quick, 
and laid bare the wounded spirit, some gentler, 
wooing ministry, like that of Hamilton or Neely, 
came pointing the way to the cross. There was 
no lifting of the finger tip, daintily gloved and 
decorous, in token of a desire sometime or other 
to become a Christian. Cards, in colors, bear- 
74 



THE OLD SOUTH 



ing name and rates of the evangelist, agreeing 
to meet everybody in heaven, were not passed 
around for signatures. I never hear the old 
hymn of invitation, that lured many a hardened 
sinner of the Old South, as they sung it under 
the leafy arbor to flickering lights, after a weird, 
unearthly stirring of our hearts by the man in 
the pulpit, but I think of a great criminal law- 
yer, who for many years had led the bar of his 
State, and had made mock of God's Book and 
Church and ministers. He owned an old car- 
riage driver who was one of God's saints in 
black, gray-haired and patient "Uncle Aleck," 
who had mourned and prayed over his unbeHev- 
ing master. "Uncle Aleck," he said to him one 
day, "why do you believe in a book you can't 
read, and in a God you never saw ? I have thou- 
sands of books in my library, yet I care nothing 
for religion." Uncle Aleck's only reply was to 
put his hand on his heart and say : "Marse John, 
I've been true and faithful to you all these years, 
ain't I, marster?" "Yes." "And I never lied 
to you or disobeyed you, has I, Marse John?" 
"No." "Then, marster, it's my religion that has 
made me what I am. I can't read, I can't see 
75 



THE OLD SOUTH 



God, but I know the Lord Jesus Christ here in 
my heart." 

Drawn by some spell he could not resist, the 
great lawyer came to the old camp ground and 
heard the awfully solemn message of the preach- 
er with bowed head and heart full of trouble. 
When the hymn was sung, 

"Come, humble sinner, in whose breast 

A thousand thoughts revolve ; 
Come, with your guilt and fear oppressed, 
And make this last resolve," 

I shall never forget the startled look of preacher 
and people as straight to the mourners' bench 
sped the lawyer, crying in agony as he fell to the 
ground : ''Send for Uncle Aleck !" And down 
in the straw white-haired old Aleck wrestled 
with God for Marse John, until a great shout 
went up from mourner and congregation as the 
master hugged the old darky and the darky 
hugged his master, saying: "I knew it was com- 
ing, Marse John." You will pardon a man 
whose head is growing gray if at times the heart 
grows hungry to turn back and see and hear the 
old sights and sounds of God's presence and 
76 



THE OLD SOUTH 



power as revealed especially at the ancient and 
now nearly extinct camp meeting. 



ON a bright April day, 1861, books were 
closed in the old academy, there was the 
blare of bugle and roll of drum on the streets, peo- 
ple were hurrying together, and soon the roar of 
a cannon shook the building, as they told us of the 
bombardment of Sumter by the batteries of the 
young Confederacy. For months the very air 
had been vibrant with sound of drum and fife, of 
rattling musket and martial command. The Old 
South was soon a great camp of shifting, drilling 
soldiery. Every departing train bore to the 
front the raw and ungainly troops of the coun- 
try, the trim city companies of State guards, and 
the gayly dressed cadets of the military schools. 
There were tender partings and long good-bys, 
so long to many of them that not yet has word 
of home greeting come. It seemed a great thing 
to be a soldier in those brave days when the girls 
decked the parting ones in flowers and sang to 
them "The Girl I Left Behind Me," "Bonnie Blue 
77 



^'OfQ 



THE OLD SOUTH 



Flag," and ^'Maryland, My Maryland." The 
scarlet and gold and gray, the flashing sword and 
burnished musket, the gay flowers and parting 
song, marked the beginning of that mighty death 
struggle of the Old South. Soon the gay song 
deepened into the hush before a great battle, or 
rose into the cry of the stricken heart over the 
long lists of wounded and slain. War grew 
grim and fierce and relentless. There were hun- 
ger and wounds, pale faces in hospital and sharp 
death of men at the front; and sleeplessness and 
heartache and holy privation and unfaihng cour- 
age and comfort of Southern womanhood at 
home. Fiercer and hotter came the storm of 
battle, as the thin gray lines of Lee and Johnston 
confronted the soldiery and the resources of the 
world. Manassas, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, 
Seven Pines, Chancellorsville, Vicksburg, Gettys- 
burg, the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, 
Appomattox ! — how these names, that wreathed 
with crape their thousands of hearts and homes, 
and marked the rise and fall of the battle tide, 
recall to us the passing of the Old South ! 

On another April day in 1865, as a boy in Ma- 
hone's Division, I looked my last into the face 
78 



THE OLD SOUTH 



of the Old South and its great commander, who 
came ridmg- down the Hne of our stacked guns, 
and, halting his old gray war horse Traveler, 
tried to comfort our hearts by saying: "It's all 
over. Never mind, men; you have done your 
best. Go to your homes and be as brave and true 
as you have been with me." 

In the great day of national assize, when em- 
pire, kingdom, and republic of earth shall be 
gathered to judgment, and the Muse of history 
shall unroll the record of their good and evil, the 
Old South, the "uncrowned queen" of the cen- 
turies, will be in their midst, her white vestment 
stained by the blood of her sons, her eyes dimmed 
by sorrow and suffering. No chaplet of laurel 
shall encircle her brow, and no noisy trump of 
fame shall hail her coming; but round her fair, 
proud head, as of yore, shall shine a halo of love, 
and Fame shall hang her head rebuked, and the 
trumpet fall from her nerveless hand, as the spirit 
of the Old South is passing by. 
79 



PEL 






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